You pretty much nailed what I was going to say. Yeah, I found it a bit strange that the only alternative to using an ORM that the author could imagine was to ro

You pretty much nailed what I was going to say. Yeah, I found it a bit strange that the only alternative to using an ORM that the author could imagine was to roll your own? What's the problem with using SQL directly? To answer the grandparent: I did read TFA, and I don't buy it. His claim that a good ORM makes 90% easier and gets out of the way of the remaining 10% doesn't match my experience with any ORM at least. Perhaps I'm wrong! All I'm saying is that from what I can tell, using an ORM buys you nothing worth buying. edit: Ha, you're being sarcastic. No, I'm serious. Are you saying that using an ORM solves escaping problems? I honestly have never connected those two. That to me is a problem calling for a set of escaping/unescaping functions, not an object-relational mapping. To each their own...